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Immigration

By MARTY GOODMAN “Go out of the shadows. Go out and fight.” — Amanda Morales-Guerra, Guatemalan immigrant Amanda Morales-Guerra, a Guatemalan immigrant living in New York City, faces deportation and separation from her three children, but she is not alone. Amanda has found sanctuary for herself and her three children within the Holyrood Church in…

By MARCO DAVILA Below is the presentation by Marco Dávila to the meeting in defense of public housing, on July 6 in the Glendale neighborhood of South East Minneapolis. For more information about the campaign in the defense of Glendale, visit the webpage: www.defendglendale.weebly.com . I’m just here to say: It feels good to be on…

By MARK UGOLINI Democratic Party Mayors Eric Garcetti and Rahm Emanuel proudly declare that they run “Sanctuary Cities.” They claim that Los Angeles and Chicago offer “sanctuary” for immigrants; that local police will neither ask about immigration status, nor will they detain immigrants for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). These reassurances are phony, designed to…

By MARTY GOODMAN Beginning on May 19, thousands of textile sweatshop workers in Haiti walked off the job or laid down inside their textile assembly plants to protest their starvation wages. The workers are demanding a raise from $4.67 per day to $12.47 per day, a raise not tied to increased production quotas for workers.…

By MARTY GOODMAN — NEW YORK — B&H Photo, the nation’s largest non-chain photo store, announced during contract negotiations plans to shut down two warehouses in Brooklyn and move facilities 75 miles away to Florence, N.J., by the end of the year. For 330 immigrant B&H warehouse workers who belong to the United Steel Workers…

By MARK UGOLINI — CHICAGO — Nearly 10,000 workers, immigration rights activists, and supporters took to the streets on May Day to demand legalization of undocumented workers; an end to terrorizing immigrant communities with raids on homes and workplaces; and an end to criminalization, mass incarceration, and deportations. (See a full list of demands at…

By GEORGE SHRIVER — TUCSON, Ariz. — Hopes & expectations were widespread on the eve of May 1, 2017, that the spirit of 2006 might be revived this year. In 2006, as many as 3 million or more undocumented immigrants and their allies poured into the streets on May Day, and the reactionary Sensenbrenner bill,…

By MICHAEL SCHREIBER Millions of people around the world took part in demonstrations on May Day. Actions included a general strike and mass march, backed by the major unions, to protest government austerity measures in Puerto Rico. This followed a huge general strike in Brazil two days earlier. The May 1 international day of working-class…

By CRISTOBAL CAVAZOS DuPage Immigrant Solidarity Coalition Although, ironically, immigrant detentions are slightly down as the Great Deporter in Chief Barack Obama leaves office, Donald Trump’s new immigration guidelines seek to go well beyond Obama’s, with the possibility of deportations of millions of documented workers. Immigration agents and police officials, who in their majority supported…

By MARK UGOLINI Trump’s war on immigrant workers has moved into high gear as new orders unleash the full force of the U.S. government to greatly expand deportations, harassment, and provocative police actions in minority communities. Under Barak Obama, deportations reached a record high 434,000 for the single year 2014. Known as the “Deporter-in-Chief,” Obama,…

By CELYNE CAMEN and KAREN SCHRAUFNAGEL Trump’s ban on Muslims, which tens of thousands protested at airports across the country, was the most recent escalation of an ongoing assault on the rights of Muslims and youth from Africa and the Middle East. This group has been targeted continuously at least since the beginning of the…

By MARCO DAVILA The reactionary white contingent in the United States has become braver with the recent arrival of one of their “own” in the White House. And at this point it has become clear that to underestimate Trump is an error. For Trump and his followers, Mexicans are to blame for most of the…

By KAREN SCHRAUFNAGEL Protests erupted throughout the United States and the world following President Trump’s stunning order that suspended entry into the U.S. by refugees and other travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and Africa. Thousands demonstrated at airports and federal courthouses. Chants included: “No hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here!”…

By KAREN SCHRAUFNAGEL To respond to the incoming Trump administration—overflowing with Islamophobes—will require a strategy for challenging Islamophobia on several levels. The first thing to note, however, is that Islamophobia, defined as the irrational fear and hatred of Muslims, is not technically the correct term for the oppression that Muslims are increasingly confronting. It is…

By MARK UGOLINI — CHICAGO — Over 1000 immigration rights activists and supporters packed the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) hall on Jan. 14 to protest attacks on immigrants and refugees, and new Republican administration plans to continue and escalate harassment and mass deportations. The event was part of a National Day of Action for Immigrant…

By KAREN SCHRAUFNAGEL MINNEAPOLIS—The show trial dubbed by our local capitalist media, “Minnesota’s Terror Trial,” ended in November with the sentencing of the nine young men (eight Somali and one Oromo) who pled to or were convicted of charges relating to alleged attempts to join the “designated foreign terrorist organization” ISIS (the Islamic State). The…

By MARK UGOLINI — CHICAGO — On Aug. 29, the defense case of 69-year-old Palestinian rights activist Rasmea Odeh took an unexpected and potentially ominous turn when presiding Federal Judge Gershwin Drain ruled that Odeh will be subjected to up to 18 hours of intensive psychological testing by an appointed government forensic examiner whose job is…

By GRACE MONTESI On June 23, the U.S. Supreme Court tied 4-4 regarding an immigration action taken by President Obama in 2014. The decision left in place a lower court’s ruling that had blocked implementation of the program. Officials in our so-called democratic system have once again disregarded the immigrant rights movement and let down…

By MARK UGOLINI A spirited and determined group of about 150 current and former Nabisco bakery workers and their supporters demonstrated on May 18 at Mondelez International’s annual shareholder meeting in Lincolnshire, Ill. Workers protested the company’s decision to lay off 600 of the 1200 workers at its Southwest side Chicago plant. Mondelez International is…

By ERNIE GOTTA In February, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected the appeal of Mohammed al-Qeeq, an imprisoned Palestinian journalist on his 85th day of hunger strike. Al-Qeeq had asked to be transferred to a Palestinian hospital in the West Bank. Directly following this decision, however, a partial victory was won in the case of Palestinian American activist Rasmea…

By KAREN SCHRAUFNAGEL Beginning in early January, Socialist Action joined with many other organizations for a series of conference calls on the need for united action to more effectively combat the rising tide of Islamophobia and anti-immigrant and anti-refugee hatred in this country. The ad-hoc coalition that was formed took the name Stand Together Against…

By CARL SACK — MADISON, Wis. — More than 20,000 Latin@s took off work and marched on the Wisconsin State Capitol on Feb. 18 to demand the state legislature drop a pair of bills designed to make life harder for undocumented workers. Immigrant rights groups who planned the protest on short notice dubbed it Un…

By LISA LUINENBURG A huge number of refugees have been flowing across European borders in the last year, and this great migration crisis has had reverberations in the United States as well, where over 100,000 migrants fleeing violence in Central America arrived in 2015. As of Dec. 21, more than a million refugees have crossed…

By MICHAEL SCHREIBER In the space of less than two weeks, the world recently witnessed three massacres outside the home base of the Islamic State (ISIS) for which the jihadist group took credit. On Oct. 31, a homemade bomb brought down a Russian airliner over the Sinai, killing all 224 people on board. On Nov.…

By BARRY WEISLEDER Unprecedented numbers of people are desperate to migrate. Stories fill the media about the many who drown in the Mediterranean or die in desserts in a failed bid to escape horrible conditions. Stunning figures released on June 18 by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees quantify the extent of the global…